Amid all this intellectual and moral confusion, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have deftly proposed the notion of « Occidentalism. » This is a play on « Orientalism, » the formulation advanced by the late Edward Said, whereby a society or its academics and intellectuals can be judged by their attitude to the « other. » Avishai Margalit is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been very much identified with the secular and internationalist wing of the Israeli peace camp. Ian Buruma is known to a large audience for his witty and profound studies of Asia, Germany and England. Both authors had in common a friendship with, and a strong admiration for, Isaiah Berlin. … The authors demonstrate that there is a long history of anti-Western paranoia in the intellectual tradition of the « East, » but that much of this is rooted in non-Muslim and non-Oriental thinking. Indeed, insofar as the comparison with fascism can be made, it can be derived from some of the very origins and authors that inspired fascism itself. In many areas of German, Russian and French culture, one finds the same hatred of « decadence, » the same cultish worship of the pitiless hero, the same fascination with the infallible « leader, » the same fear of a mechanical civilization as opposed to the « organic » society based on tradition and allegiance. Christopher Hitchens

We generally understand « radical Islam » as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders, often jews, pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of « blood and soil. » The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. The Economist

They are not expressions of an outburst in the West of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict in the Middle East. It is truly modern, aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. In other words, they occupy the same space that the proletarian left had thirty years ago, that Action Directe had twenty years ago. . . . It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West. (…) It can feel like a time-warp, a return to the European left of the 1970s and early 1980s. Europe’s radical-mosque practitioners can appear, mutatis mutandis, like a Muslim version of the hard-core intellectuals and laborers behind the aggrieved but proud Scottish National party in its salad days. (…) In the last three centuries, Europe has given birth and nourishment to most of mankind’s most radical causes. It shouldn’t be that surprising to imagine that Europe could nurture Islamic militancy on its own soil. (…) In Europe as elsewhere, Westernization is the key to the growth and virulence of hard-core Islamic radicalism. The most frightening, certainly the most effective, adherents of bin Ladenism are those who are culturally and intellectually most like us. The process of Westernization liberates a Muslim from the customary sanctions and loyalties that normally corralled the dark side of the human soul. (…) It would be a delightful irony if the more progressive political and religious debates among the Middle East’s Muslims saved their brethren in the intellectually backward lands of the European Union. Reuel Marc Gerecht

Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. It is a war against a particular idea of the West – a bourgeois society addicted to money, creature comforts, sex, animal lusts, self-interest, and security – which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of ‘U.S. imperialism’ . (…) Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries invoked against the universalist claims of the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s invading armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the « Westernizers, » that is, Russian advocates of liberal reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European fascists and National Socialists sought to smash « Americanism, » Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and « rootless cosmopolitanism » (meaning Jews). Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote a book in the 1930s about fascist ideology in Austria and Germany. He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially under Stalin, although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western liberalism and « rootless cosmopolitanism. » Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and Germany. The founders of the Ba’ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase « Westoxification » to describe the poisonous influence of Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and soil. Clearly, the idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization. Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder. Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. Isaiah Berlin once described the German revolt against Napoleon as « the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character. » The same thing might be said about Japan in the 1930s, after almost a century of feeling snubbed and patronized by the West, whose achievements it so fervently tried to emulate. It has been true of the Russians, who have often slipped into the role of inferior upstarts, stuck in the outer reaches of Asia and Europe. But nothing matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in every respect by the post-Enlightenment West. Humiliation can easily turn into a cult of the pure and the authentic. Among the most resented attributes of the hated Occident are its claims to universalism. Christianity is a universalist faith, but so is the Enlightenment belief in reason. Napoleon was a universalist who believed in a common civil code for all his conquered subjects. The conviction that the United States represents universal values and has the God-given duty to spread democracy in the benighted world belongs to the same universalist tradition. Some of these values may indeed be universal. One would like to think that all people could benefit from democracy or the use of reason. The Code Napoleon brought many benefits. But when universal solutions are imposed by force, or when people feel threatened or humiliated or unable to compete with the powers that promote such solutions, that is when we see the dangerous retreat into dreams of purity. Not all dreams of local authenticity and cultural uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong. As Isaiah Berlin also pointed out, the crooked timber of humanity cannot be forcibly straightened along universal standards with impunity. The experiments on the human soul by Communism showed how bloody universalist dreams can be. And the poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the Enlightenment. It is when purity or authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins. The fact that anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and a general hostility to the West often overlap is surely no coincidence. Even in Japan, where Jews play no part in national life, one of the participants at the 1942 Kyoto conference suggested that the war against the West was a war against the « poisonous materialist civilization » built on Jewish financial capitalist power. At the same time, European anti-Semites, not only in Nazi Germany, were blaming the Jews for Bolshevism. Both Bolshevism and capitalism are universalist systems in the sense that they do not recognize national, racial, or cultural borders. Since Jews are traditionally regarded by the defenders of purity as the congenital outsiders, the archetypal « rootless cosmopolitans, » it is no wonder that they are also seen as the main carriers of the universalist virus. To be sure, Jews had sound reasons to be attracted to such notions as equality before the law, secular politics, and internationalism, whether of a socialist or capitalist stamp. Exclusivity, whether racial, religious, or nationalist, is never good for minorities. Only in the Middle East have Jews brought their own form of exclusivity and nationalism. But Zionism came from the West. And so Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, is the colonial outpost of « Westoxification. » Its material success only added to the Arab sense of historic humiliation. The idea, however, that Jews are a people without a soul, mimics with no creative powers, is much older than the founding of the State of Israel. It was one of the most common anti-Semitic slurs employed by Richard Wagner. He was neither the first to do so, nor very original in this respect. Karl Marx, himself the grandson of a rabbi, called the Jews greedy parasites, whose souls were made of money. The same kind of thing was often said by 19th-century Europeans about the British. The great Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane, who rather admired England, nonetheless opined that « the cult of the Gold Calf is the disease of the English people. » He was convinced that English society would be destroyed by « this yellow fever of gold, this sellout of all souls to the devil of Mammon. » And much the same is said today about the Americans. Calculation — the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on — is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze pilots. The hero is one who acts without calculating his interests. He jumps into action without regard for his own safety, ever ready to sacrifice himself for the cause. And the Occidentalist hero, whether he is a Nazi or an Islamist, is just as ready to destroy those who sully the purity of his race or creed. It is indeed his duty to do so. When the West is seen as the threat to authenticity, then it is the duty of all holy warriors to destroy anything to do with the « Zionist Crusaders, » whether it is a U.S. battleship, a British embassy, a Jewish cemetery, a chunk of lower Manhattan, or a disco in Bali. The symbolic value of these attacks is at least as important as the damage inflicted. What, then, is new about the Islamist holy war against the West? Perhaps it is the totality of its vision. Islamism, as an antidote to Westoxification, is an odd mixture of the universal and the pure: universal because all people can, and in the eyes of the believers should, become orthodox Muslims; pure because those who refuse the call are not simply lost souls but savages who must be removed from this earth. Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews, among others, but did not view the entire West with hostility. In fact, he wanted to forge an alliance with the British and other « Aryan » nations, and felt betrayed when they did not see things his way. Stalinists and Maoists murdered class enemies and were opposed to capitalism. But they never saw the Western world as less than human and thus to be physically eradicated. Japanese militarists went to war against Western empires but did not regard everything about Western civilization as barbarous. The Islamist contribution to the long history of Occidentalism is a religious vision of purity in which the idolatrous West simply has to be destroyed. The worship of false gods is the worst religious sin in Islam as well as in ancient Judaism. The West, as conceived by Islamists, worships the false gods of money, sex, and other animal lusts. In this barbarous world the thoughts and laws and desires of Man have replaced the kingdom of God. The word for this state of affairs is jahiliyya, which can mean idolatry, religious ignorance, or barbarism. Applied to the pre-Islamic Arabs, it means ignorance: People worshiped other gods because they did not know better. But the new jahiliyya, in the sense of barbarism, is everywhere, from Las Vegas and Wall Street to the palaces of Riyadh. To an Islamist, anything that is not pure, that does not belong to the kingdom of God, is by definition barbarous and must be destroyed. Just as the main enemies of Russian Slavophiles were Russian Westernizers, the most immediate targets of Islamists are the liberals, reformists, and secular rulers in their own societies. They are the savage stains that have to be cleansed with blood. But the source of the barbarism that has seduced Saudi princes and Algerian intellectuals as much as the whores and pimps of New York (and in a sense all infidels are whores and pimps) is the West. And that is why holy war has been declared against the West. Ian Buruma

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said’s Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of « the East » in the Western colonial mind. But « the West » is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of « the West » in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonising fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.

We generally understand « radical Islam » as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders, often jews, pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of « blood and soil. » The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision.

OCCIDENTALISM
The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
By Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit
165 pages. Penguin Press. $21.95.

As Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit remind us, the suicide attacks on American targets were carried out by young men who were hardly strangers to the West. University educated and relatively well to do, most of them were quite worldly, but that very worldliness led them to despise the United States, to see Americans as corrupters, comfort-loving cowards, spiritual eunuchs. Boarding the planes that they would turn into deadly missiles, they embraced the prospect of martyrdom in a holy cause.

But these particular suicide pilots were not members of Al Qaeda or even Islamists; they were kamikazes, what the Japanese called Tokkotai, or special attack forces. For Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit, the parallels with 9/11 are not accidental. As they see it, imperial Japan and Al Qaeda are variations on one historically tenacious, deeply anti-liberal theme. Occidentalism, as they call it, is not a full-blown ideology but rather a »cluster of prejudices »: a way of demonizing and inciting violence against the bourgeois West. It is the shared parlance of Maoists and Nazis, Baathists and the Khmer Rouge, 19th-century Slavophiles and today’s jihadists. And paradoxically, it too, they argue, is a creature of the West, the bastard child of Enlightenment rationalism and freedom.

Mr. Buruma (a distinguished observer of Asia) and Mr. Margalit (a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) know better than to push their thesis too far. »Occidentalism » does not pretend to offer a universal theory of anti-liberalism, and it recognizes the distinctive local ingredients in the poisons spread by the most virulent enemies of the modern West. Still, the connections that Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit establish in their elegant, breezily erudite little book are striking. They have written a useful primer on the habits of mind that drive our most implacable foes.

Part of Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit’s project is intellectual genealogy. Like Paul Berman in his recent book »Terror and Liberalism, » they trace the often surprising pathways by which exposure to the West has been transformed into hatred of Western societies. Most Tokkotai volunteers, it turns out, were bookish radicals, readers who took to heart the lessons of Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx. Pol Pot, while a student in postwar Paris, absorbed the polemics of Frantz Fanon and other bloody-minded Western critics of colonialism, with devastating consequences for Cambodia. Sayyid Qutb came to the United States from Egypt in 1948 to study English and went home appalled by the materialism and gross sensuality of American culture; he became a key ideologist in the development of Islamism.

Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit’s most valuable contribution, however, is to set out in vivid (if sometimes repetitive) detail the ugly lexicon of Occidentalism. As they show, the fiercest opponents of bourgeois democracy have diverged much more in the alternatives they propose — rule by the Volk, the vanguard, the community of true believers — than in the images and metaphors they use to describe their common enemy. To the Occidentalist imagination, the modern West comes to life as a collection of weak, complacent merchants, slaves to comfort who know nothing of self-sacrifice; or as a cold, mechanical, ruthlessly efficient »mind, » crushing every higher ideal in the name of commercial and technological advance.

Above all, the West is embodied for its enemies in what Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit call »the Occidental city. » Here the motifs of corruption and degeneracy find a geographic home and a wider cast of sinister characters: Jews, prostitutes, financiers, rootless cosmopolitans of every description. Through the eyes of the Occidentalist, the modern metropolis appears »inhuman, a zoo of depraved animals, consumed by lust. » It is a problem whose only remedy lies in the redemptive power of revolutionary violence.

The great disappointment of »Occidentalism » is the reluctance of Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit to draw any serious practical conclusion from their »tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. » Their portrait of the West’s enemies, they insist, is not meant to answer present-day critics of the United States and its foreign policy, let alone to serve as »ammunition in a global ‘war against terrorism.’ » They even warn (in an alarmist mode familiar to readers of The New York Review of Books, where the kernel of »Occidentalism » first appeared) that we must not »fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. »

But there is no mistaking the political implications of Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit’s analysis. To argue that the West is reviled today more for what it is than for what it does is to fall on one side of the fractious post-9/11 debate. Here they might have consulted Edward Said, whose hectoring spirit hovers over the pages of »Occidentalism. » Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit claim to be extending — turning »upside down, » as it were — Mr. Said’s signature idea of Orientalism. But it is easy to imagine what the relentlessly ideological Mr. Said would have seen in their work: yet another supposed instance of Western scholarship whose picture of the hostile, backward Oriental »Other » invites the exercise of Western power.

This possibility plainly troubles Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit, but it shouldn’t. Their account is accurate and fair-minded. More important perhaps, Western power in relation to our current Occidentalist foes takes many forms, not all of them khaki and green. Indeed, what is so glaringly absent from Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit’s book is any notion of how our ideas, if not our arms, might be used to counter the violence and propaganda of the Occidentalists.

At a moment when Mao’s China is undergoing a capitalist revolution and Khomeini’s Iran is being swept by demands for democratic accountability, their reticence is puzzling. It suggests not just a failure of political imagination but a lack of confidence in the West itself.

Well, there certainly ought to be a word for it. « Westerners » can be easily arraigned or lampooned as imperialists or racists, or « Eurocentrics, » and a surprisingly large number of them are more than ready to accept the implied guilt involved here, or at least to submit themselves to the procedure of self-criticism. Yet according to one theory of « racism, » only white people can be guilty of it, since it — « racism » — is a power structure rather than a prejudice. Thus, one also needs a distinct term for a black person who is ethnically bigoted or race-obsessed (« racialist » might do here).

And what about Osama bin Laden, whose expressed desire is for the restoration of a lost empire in the form of the old Muslim Caliphate? It might seem odd to describe him as an imperialist, but not at all wrong to call him a reactionary, say, or an irredentist, or a nostalgist. To say nothing of his sectarian hatred for all Jews, all Christians, most Shia Muslims, Hindus, emancipated women, homosexuals and — the world’s most important minority in my view — secular unbelievers. Here, the rigorously accurate term might be « fascist. » I once proposed the formulation « fascism with an Islamic face » and have found this played back to me in the slightly cruder version of « Islamo-fascism. »

Amid all this intellectual and moral confusion, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have deftly proposed the notion of « Occidentalism. » This is a play on « Orientalism, » the formulation advanced by the late Edward Said, whereby a society or its academics and intellectuals can be judged by their attitude to the « other. » Avishai Margalit is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been very much identified with the secular and internationalist wing of the Israeli peace camp. Ian Buruma is known to a large audience for his witty and profound studies of Asia, Germany and England. Both authors had in common a friendship with, and a strong admiration for, Isaiah Berlin. (Here is probably the place to disclose that I know and like Ian Buruma, liked but did not so much admire Isaiah Berlin, and was a close friend of Edward Said.)

The book is short to the point of terseness, but by no means superficial. The authors demonstrate that there is a long history of anti-Western paranoia in the intellectual tradition of the « East, » but that much of this is rooted in non-Muslim and non-Oriental thinking. Indeed, insofar as the comparison with fascism can be made, it can be derived from some of the very origins and authors that inspired fascism itself. In many areas of German, Russian and French culture, one finds the same hatred of « decadence, » the same cultish worship of the pitiless hero, the same fascination with the infallible « leader, » the same fear of a mechanical civilization as opposed to the « organic » society based on tradition and allegiance.

I was very struck recently by seeing Tom Cruise’s appalling movie The Last Samurai, where an American adventurer takes the side of feudal and tribal chivalry in Japan, presumably because of its self-annihilating authenticity, but realizes during the course of several destructive massacres that the samurai ethos will not survive in the face of modernity. What is needed, he concludes, is a fusion or synthesis between new weapons and old ideas. It’s bad enough that an American, even a Scientologist, could actually desire to see what Japan eventually got — in the combination of an imperial god-king with a large air force and navy, an evil empire and an absolutely calamitous war. Even more alarming was the cultural myopia that prevented critics and audiences from seeing that precisely this combination of medieval and atavistic ideas with borrowed technology is what threatens Eastern societies no less than our own.

Elements of the same self-hatred are what preoccupy Buruma and Margalit. What is it in the Western soul that thrills to violence and authority and fanaticism? Well, to get one problem out of the way at once, there is no doubt that Jew-hatred, and a morbid suspicion of the Enlightenment, have something to do with it. Behind the apparent self-confidence of the supposedly « organic » racial communities of Europe, there lurks an insecurity that half realizes that the Christian-based nation-state is something of a fiction, or « construct. »

In parallel with this insecurity is the recurrent fear of a secret or invisible government that really pulls all the strings. The paranoid fantasy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is often wrongly called a « forgery » (it is in fact a whole-cloth fabrication) is the apotheosis of this mentality. One can safely call it a fantasy because it can, to weak or disordered minds, explain everything from godless cosmopolitanism to Judeo-Bolshevism (the secret fear of the Nazi Party) to Judeo-plutocracy (the other secret fear of the Nazi Party and of some others, too, like T. S. Eliot). In his great study of the origins of the Protocols, which was entitled Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn also laid stress on the anti-Semite’s hatred and fear of urbanization and modernity.

Counterposed to this sinister conspiracy of the idle and effeminate and intellectual — the very word « intellectual » was coined as a term of abuse by the enemies of Dreyfus — is the assertion of the manly, heroic warrior who fights in the open. The classic text here is Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel, a paean to the self-sacrifice of German youth on the Western Front in the First World War, and an emotional contributor to the torch-bearing and re-nationalized « youth » movements of the right that succeeded it. Such supposed inspiration breathes contempt for the ideas of comfort, security and democracy, which are the consolations of the mediocre. Buruma and Margalit say that « some of the rhetoric now coming from the United States, specifically in neo-conservative circles, comes close to this vision. » If they are willing to say « specifically, » it would be nice if they could or would specify, which they do not.

A central chapter focuses on the macabre question of suicide, or the belief that death should be loved more than life. This is not a pathology unique to al-Qaeda, and even less is it unique to Islam. The most famous devotees of suicide in antiquity were indeed the Assassins, but they in turn were vanquished by Muslim regimes. The so-called Kamikaze warriors of Imperial Japan were also very frightening until they were defeated, and nearer to our own time the tactic of suicide-murder was further evolved by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, another non-Islamic group and incidentally another faction whose tactics have proved self-defeating.

The method here is not the important thing. The ideology is what counts. Those who are eager to die are expressing a hatred for the everyday, banal achievements of human society. This may be less scary than it looks: Every second-rate volunteer in a democratic army must in the last resort be just as much prepared to die as to kill, and such forces also have their overwhelming and awe-inspiring victories. (Incidentally, in a book so preoccupied with the suicide question, and with the relationship of the West to Judaism and to Israel, it would have been interesting to know what the authors made of Masada.)

Occidentalism repays study because it reminds us of how much the suicide of our own society has been advocated from within its own citadel, and of how reactionary and counter-humanistic such advocacy has been. The ideas of liberal pluralism are newer in « the West » than we suppose, and could in fact use some ruthless warriors of their own.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.

THE idea of »the enemy » is uncongenial to the countries of the post-cold-war West, countries that until recently believed they had no natural predators. Two new titles address the post-Sept. 11 recognition that we do indeed have enemies in the world.

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s book »Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies » is written against the backdrop of the late Edward Said’s influential work »Orientalism. » Said drew attention to the West’s elaborately constructed accounts of an exotic East, and to the grotesque generalizations of the many writers who depicted an Orient where life was cheap, the mentality inscrutable and people were either hopelessly passive or irrationally volatile.

As Said noted in one of his last essays, however, many in the Middle East had themselves »slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the U.S. is really like as a society. » They had adopted their own kind of overgeneralizations about »the Other, » the West of the East. Buruma, a noted British journalist, and Margalit, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University, call this »Occidentalism, » and in their fine book they show that although such an image serves the purpose of militant Islamism, its history is far older than Al Qaeda and its influence far wider than Asia.

Occidentalism consists of a complex of assumptions about Western culture — that it is arrogant, materialistic, secular, superficial and rootless, and that the United States, against which such charges are scarcely without foundation, is its chief representative. The authors discover the origin of this stereotype not in the East, however, but in the reaction of elements within the West itself to the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, a reaction that then spread to non-Western societies.

This claim is the most ambitious and impressive aspect of »Occidentalism, » and yet as an argument it surely needs further development. Heidegger, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong may all have despised the cosmopolitan city, with its political corruption, loose sexual mores and commercialized glamour. Solzhenitsyn, Osama bin Laden and Herder may all have preached against sterile rationalism and the instrumental, secular view of life. But it is unpersuasive to locate the universalizing goals of Maoism in the ideas of the supremely localist Counter-Enlightenment, and just as unpersuasive to link the blood-and-culture movements of the Counter-Enlightenment to radical, global Islam. Buruma and Margalit are on firmer ground when they show that all these elements are united in their portrayal of the cowardly West as so weakened by its addiction to material pleasures that it is unable to make the sacrifices necessary for its own defense.

If Occidentalism can be found in the minds of Al Qaeda’s supporters, it also makes an appearance in the writings of some of the West’s defenders, like Lee Harris, the author of »Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. » The title of this work brings to mind classic predecessors: Freud’s »Civilization and Its Discontents » and Karl Popper’s »Open Society and Its Enemies. » Unlike Buruma and Margalit, Harris does not strive to complement earlier work so much as to extend it to the contemporary political scene. Bin Laden, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Iraq of Saddam Hussein are treated to a socio-psychological critique that would not be out of place in a Freudian analysis of a family: by bestowing unearned wealth, status and even statehood on certain groups, Harris argues, the West has encouraged their »fantasy ideologies, » which intoxicate and decivilize them. As a consequence, we face antagonists who, regardless of our attempts to placate them, have made us their enemies for no other reason than that they profoundly wish to be our enemies. Because we do not appreciate this dynamic, we persist in trying to propitiate rather than confront them.

Much as Popper once attacked illiberal dogmatism, Harris now reproves the liberal West. In its complacency and comfort, it has forgotten the basis of its own existence — namely, a ruthlessness that it once practiced. We need, he says, to attend to the lesson of Kurosawa’s »Seven Samurai » — that only violent men of honor can save us from the violent thugs who beset us. Unfortunately, he says (in his own display of Occidentalism), we have so debased our virility, our sense of shame and honor, that we risk not being able to produce men who can honorably practice the ruthlessness required to protect our society.

This is a bracing argument. Harris, who writes with considerable clarity and erudition, provides an antidote to the empty claims of some that if we change our behavior in any significant way, then »the terrorists win »; or that if we become more aggressive toward terrorists by moving away from a law enforcement model toward warfare, we have abandoned any claim to legitimacy; or that we can successfully defeat Al Qaeda if only we have better intelligence.

Nevertheless, the shortcomings of Harris’s approach are pretty considerable. First, as Ariel Sharon has amply demonstrated, ruthlessness is not a policy; it is only a tactic. Despite Harris’s repeated insistence that Clausewitz has nothing to say to policy makers today, we still must learn to calibrate the violence we employ to the long-term political goals it is meant to serve. The successful use of violence, rather than concord with a particular theory of justice, does indeed establish legitimacy, as Harris argues. Violence alone, however, cannot maintain legitimacy. »The strongest man is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty, » Rousseau wrote. Our own people, to say nothing of the allies we must have in order to wage a successful war against terrorism, have to be persuaded that the violence we use will in fact result in a safer, more humane world.

Harris is a conservative essayist whose work has appeared in Policy Review, and this is a polemical book that must be taken on those terms. Even so, it would have profited from a more attentive editor. To take a single example, on one page Harris writes that »ruthlessness is the great driving motor of human history, » while on the very next page he tells us that the »pattern of accidents and/or unintended consequences that are subsequently taken up and turned into a deliberate strategy is the driving engine of human history. »

BOTH of these books deal with »the enemy, » and so both have a good deal to say about fascism, an ideology built on demonizing the Other. It is good to keep in mind that it was fascism’s ruthlessness that ultimately discredited it when it was defeated militarily. Most important, we should recall the words of the fascist Carl Schmitt (no mean Occidentalist himself): »The enemy, » he wrote, »is our own question in visible form. » What Harris sees in bin Laden is a reflection of what he sees as wrong in Western culture; what Buruma and Margalit see in Occidentalism is the reaction of elements within our own cultural heritage to the universalizing secular message of the West.

Freud and Popper were shaken by the collapse of the Weimar Republic, an enlightened, cosmopolitan state, and it is true that Weimar fell because too few enlightened liberals were willing to defend it, but I doubt this will be the case with the United States or with the West generally. Rather, it is another aspect of the Weimar experience, its internal lack of confidence, that 21st-century Western states will have to face up to. Confidence can be undermined when some Westerners — read »Americans » — are held in the contempt that invites aggression or excuses it by those who envy our success and feel powerless to dislodge us from our ever-growing heights of influence and willfulness. It is not our enemies so much as our unpersuaded friends — as well as numbers of our fellow citizens — who will pose the most difficult challenges for leaders at war with terrorism.

Jihad Made In Europe
There may be more to fear from a mosque in Leeds than a madrassa in the Middle East
Reuel Marc Gerecht
07/25/2005

THE JULY SUICIDE BOMBINGS IN London–some or all of whose perpetrators were Muslims born and reared in Britain–are likely to produce in the United Kingdom the same intellectual reflection on Muslim identity in Europe that is already underway in nearby countries. The French began this reflection in earnest ten years ago, after bomb-happy, lycée-educated, French-born Islamic holy warriors terrorized France. The Spanish began it after their own train bombings in March 2004, and the Dutch after the brutal slaying of the film director Theo van Gogh by a Muslim militant in November 2004. Quite likely the British will reach the same conclusion the French already have, to wit: Islamic terrorism on European soil has its roots in the Middle East. « British Islam »–the behavior and spiritual practice of Muslims in the United Kingdom–it will be said, is by and large a progressive force standing against pernicious and retrograde ideas emanating from the Middle East. There are big problems of acculturation at home in mother England, all will confess, but the holy-warrior mentality is imported.

This view, however, may turn out to be dead wrong. What was once unquestionably an import has gone native, mutated, and grown. Some of what the Europeans are now confronting–and for the United States this is very bad news–is probably a locally generated Islamic militancy that is as retrograde and virulent as anything encountered in the Middle East. « European Islam » appears to be an increasingly radicalizing force intellectually and in practice. The much-anticipated Muslim moderates of Europe–the folks French scholar Gilles Kepel believes will produce « extraordinary progress in civilization, » a new « Andalusia » (the classical Arabic word for Moorish Spain) that will save us from Osama bin Laden’s jihad–have so far not developed with the same gusto as the Muslim activists who have dominated too many mosques in « Londonistan » and elsewhere in Europe. Moderates surely represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe, but like their post-Christian European counterparts, they usually express their moderation in detachment from religious affairs.

Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success. It explains why Muslim activists gain so much attention, be they arch-conservatives, like the devotees of the Tabligh movement in Britain and on the continent who espouse segregation in Europe, or « progressives, » like the Switzerland-based intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who refuses forthrightly to declare the Muslim Holy Law null and void as a political testament for Muslims in a European democracy. The moderates have abandoned the field. They have become European. The militants, who perhaps should be seen as deviants from a largely successful process of secularization, are the only ones left ardently praying.

For organizations like al Qaeda, this may mean that the future will be decisively European. From its earliest days, al Qaeda viewed Europe as an important launching platform for attacks against the United States and its interests. Now, Western counterterrorist forces, which have traditionally tried to track Middle Eastern missionaries in Europe, would be well advised to start searching for radical European Muslim missionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere. Some Europeans–and they are mostly French–have seen the future. Always ahead of his time, the French scholar Olivier Roy has written:

When we consider the [Islamic] movements that embrace violence, we can see that they are not expressions of an outburst in the West of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict in the Middle East. Most of the young Muslims radicalize in the West: They are « born-again Muslims. » It’s here that they are Islamicized. Almost all separate from their families and many have marriages with non-Muslims. Their dispute with the world isn’t imported from the Middle East: It is truly modern, aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. In other words, they occupy the same space that the proletarian left had thirty years ago, that Action Directe had twenty years ago. . . . They exist in a militant reality abandoned by the extreme left, where the young live only to destroy the system. . . . [This radicalization] isn’t at all the consequence of a « clash of civilizations, » that is to say, the importation of intellectual frameworks coming from the Middle East. This militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West.

Roy may overstate the autonomy of Islamic radicalism in Europe from the militancy in the Middle East; he surely diminishes too much the religious ingredient in the emerging radical Muslim European identity. But my own visits to numerous radical mosques in Western Europe since 9/11 suggest that he is more right than wrong about the Europeanization of Islamic militancy. The Saudis may pay for the mosques and the visiting Saudi and Jordanian imams, but the believers are often having very European conversations in European languages. In France, Belgium, or Holland, sitting with young male believers can feel like a time-warp, a return to the European left of the 1970s and early 1980s. Europe’s radical-mosque practitioners can appear, mutatis mutandis, like a Muslim version of the hard-core intellectuals and laborers behind the aggrieved but proud Scottish National party in its salad days. These young men are often Sunni versions of the Iranian radicals who gathered around the jumbled, deeply contradictory, religious left-wing ideas of Ali Shariati, one of the intellectual fathers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s « red-mullah » revolution of 1979, and the French-educated ex-Communist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who became in the 1960s perhaps the most famous theoretician of Muslim alienation in the Western world.

The Shiite parallel is also pertinent since it elucidates the motives of Sunni believers who see murder as a martyr’s expression of devotion to God. The thousands of Iranians who gleefully went to their deaths in suicidal missions against the Iraqis in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war did so in part, as the Franco-Iranian scholar Farhad Khosrakhavar has written, because the « liberty to die as a martyr served to maintain the phantasm of revolutionary possibilities. » Death is both the ultimate expression of a very Western idea of individual freedom and self-creation and a very Islamic conception of self-abnegation before God’s will. Talk to young radical Muslims in Europe–young men who in all probability have no desire whatsoever to kill themselves or others for any cause–and you can often nevertheless find an appreciation of the idea of martyrdom almost identical to the Iranian death-wish of yesteryear. In the last three centuries, Europe has given birth and nourishment to most of mankind’s most radical causes. It shouldn’t be that surprising to imagine that Europe could nurture Islamic militancy on its own soil.

In Europe as elsewhere, Westernization is the key to the growth and virulence of hard-core Islamic radicalism. The most frightening, certainly the most effective, adherents of bin Ladenism are those who are culturally and intellectually most like us. The process of Westernization liberates a Muslim from the customary sanctions and loyalties that normally corralled the dark side of the human soul. Respect for one’s father, an appreciation for the human need to have fun, a toleration of eccentricity and naughty personal behavior, the love of art and folk music–all are characteristics of traditional mainstream Muslim society wiped away by the arrival of modernity and the simultaneous spread of sterile, esthetically empty, angry, Saudi-financed Wahhabi thought. In this sense, bin Ladenism is the Muslim equivalent of Western totalitarianism. This cleaning of the slate, this break with the past, is probably more profound in the Muslim enclaves in Europe–what Gilles Kepel called les banlieues de l’Islam–than it is in the urban sprawl of Cairo, where traditional mores, though under siege and badly battered by modernity, nevertheless retain considerable force. Cairo gave us Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s great intellectual; it’s not unreasonable to fear that London or Paris or Berlin will give us his successor.

This view understandably receives a poor reception in Europe. Most intellectuals and politicians would prefer to see Islamic terrorism in Europe as a by-product of accumulated foreign grievances. There are the aftershocks of the second Algerian civil war–the guerre à outrance that started in 1991 between the Islamists and the election-aborting military regime–and especially the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, which most in the European intelligentsia have viewed as the spur to Islamic radicalism and the cause of the bad blood between the Arabs and the West. The American war against Saddam Hussein in 1990-91 exacerbated the division between Islamic militants in Europe, who for the most part opposed an infidel « invasion » of Iraq, and European governments, which (often tepidly) backed the American-led ejection of Saddam from Kuwait. This view reappeared in Western Europe with the Second Gulf war against Saddam in 2003. European domestic peace was thus increasingly held hostage by American foreign policy, especially America’s wars and its unwillingness to force Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. Talk to European counterterrorist officials and they go apoplectic enumerating the ways America, notably the Bush administration, has made their work more difficult.

Although some of the reasons put forth by Europeans to explain their Muslim problems are undoubtedly valid, a wise U.S. counterterrorist policy would downplay the external causes of Islamic activism in Europe. We should prepare for the worst-case scenario and assume that European society itself will continue to generate the most lethal holy warriors. In doing so, American officials should be skeptical of their own ability to identify through profiling which Muslim Europeans might engage in terrorism against the United States. Stamps in passports indicating travel to Middle Eastern countries can’t tell you much, since holy-warrior pilgrimages are not required to fortify jihadist spirits and networks. Living in London, Leeds, or Manchester can be more than enough.

This means, of course, that the Bush administration ought to preempt fate and suspend the visa-waiver program established in 1986 for Western Europeans. It is true that consular officers were a poor frontline defense before 9/11 against Muslim extremists trying to enter the United States. But the United States would be safer with some screening mechanism, however imperfect, before Europeans arrive at our borders. The transatlantic crowd in Washington–the bedrock of America’s foreign-policy establishment–might rise in high dudgeon at the damage this could do to U.S.-European relations. The State Department’s European and consular-affairs bureaus might add that they no longer have the staff to handle the enormous number of applicants. Ignore them. American-European relations were just fine when we required all Europeans to obtain visas before crossing our borders. Consular officers are among the most overworked personnel in the U.S. government. So draft poorly utilized personnel from the Department of Homeland Security until the consular corps at the State Department can grow sufficiently. Issuing visas to Europeans would be an annoying inconvenience for all; it would not, however, be an insult. Given the damage one small cell of suicidally inclined radical Muslim Europeans could do in the New York City or Washington metro or on Amtrak’s wide-open trains, it’s not too much to ask.

THERE IS GOOD NEWS from Europe, however. By now, Great Britain and the United States should have been struck repeatedly by cells of Europeanized Muslims. The training and education required for such attacks is minimal. It is difficult not to conclude that we have avoided this calamity because al Qaeda and its allied extremist groups have so far been somewhat lame in recruiting militants in Europe, even though the pool of possible recruits, given the enormous social and economic problems within its Muslim communities, ought to be fairly large. One catastrophic hit (the London attacks don’t qualify) is certainly enough to skewer our entire perspective on what constitutes successful recruitment operations. Nevertheless it is astonishing how poorly al Qaeda and its friends have done in Europe. We have the war in Iraq, which according to most terrorist experts, Republican realists, Democratic senators, and just about every European expert on Islam has been a boon to jihadist recruitment worldwide. We also have the supposed boon to the Islamists from our ignominy at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, plus the very evident friendship between President Bush and the villain of all villains, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. And yet the attack on London’s transportation system is the best that the holy warriors can do to punish the Anglo-American infidels for their sins in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere?

And what isn’t happening in Europe isn’t happening either in Iraq. If the Bush administration weren’t so rhetorically maladroit, it might point out that the Islamist holy war against us in Iraq is going rather poorly. Jihadist suicide bombers have inflicted significant losses upon us and especially upon the Iraqi people, but again what is striking about the Iraq campaign, as about jihadist recruitment efforts in Western Europe, is how few holy warriors have come calling. Historically, Afghanistan was a sideshow, while Mesopotamia is at the center of both Arab and Muslim history. In the fundamentalist imagination, the former Soviet Union was a distinctly smaller devil than insidious America, which has been central to Islamist ideology since the collapse of Britain as a world power. Diehard « Arab Afghans » in the Soviet-Afghan war could regularly complain about how weak support was for the mujahedeen in Muslim, and especially Arab, lands.

Yet if one compares the number of Muslim volunteers who went to fight the Soviets (and let us assume that no more than 10,000 went, most of them after 1984, even though many analysts think the number of « Arab Afghans » was much higher) with the highest figures one hears for foreign holy warriors in Iraq (one to two hundred entering Iraq each month), the result is astonishing, and for would-be jihadists depressing. Traveling to Iraq from anywhere in the Arab world is easy. Language isn’t a problem. Iraqi Sunni Arab fundamentalist groups are much better plugged into the larger Arab Sunni world than were their Afghan Islamist counterparts in the 1980s. The Syrian government, and probably others in the region, would love to help all comers. We should have seen by now thousands of holy warriors coming to Iraq. Suicide bombers have clouded our accounting by magnifying the individual commitment of each jihadist and the damage he can do.

We can only guess why Iraq has been so much less of a draw than Afghanistan. A reasonable guess, however, is that the Muslim, and especially Arab, world doesn’t have its heart in this fight. Although Sunni Arabs rarely rose to denounce Saddam Hussein’s slaughtering of Arab Shiites and Kurds, they knew full well the horrors of his rule. Although many are loath to say so publicly, they know the American invasion of Iraq and George W. Bush’s rhetoric in favor of democracy have shaken the established order in the Arab world, and they are content to see it so. This is probably as true for Arab Sunni fundamentalists as it is for Arab liberals. Both, in their own ways, want to overturn the status quo. Emotions about Iraq, and the rise of democracy within its borders and beyond, are too complicated and conflicted to produce any broadly popular and effective global jihad against the Americans.

There is no satisfying, expeditious answer to Europe’s Muslim problems. If Olivier Roy is right–European Islam, for better and for worse, is now independent of the Middle East–then democracy could come to Muslims’ ancestral homelands even as a virulent form of Islamic militancy persisted for years in Western Europe. But the intellectual and family ties with the Middle East are probably still sufficient to ensure that if the Middle East changes for the better, the ripples will quickly reach Europe. The democratic discussion in the Middle East, which is often broadcast through media headquartered in Europe, is becoming ever more vibrant and powerful. If Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt begins to give way to democracy, it’s a very good bet that the discussion in every single mosque in Western Europe will be about the popular triumph and the democratic experiment beginning in the Arab world’s most important country.

Amid all the ensuing political and religious debates and arguments, in the expectant hope that other dictators would fall, al Qaeda and its allied groups might find it even harder to attract recruits who would incinerate themselves for a revolutionary ideal increasingly at odds with reality. If the Bush administration wants to help Europe, it should back as forcefully as possible the rapid expansion of democracy in the Middle East. It would be a delightful irony if the more progressive political and religious debates among the Middle East’s Muslims saved their brethren in the intellectually backward lands of the European Union.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

« America robs our oil and resources, seeks to ravage the entire globe for the interest of corporate companies, and so kills the sons of Islam in Palestine, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Indonesia, the Caucuses, and elsewhere.”

The Origins Of Occidentalism
Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. It is a war against a particular idea of the West – a bourgeois society addicted to money, creature comforts, sex, animal lusts, self-interest, and security – which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of ‘U.S. imperialism’ .
Ian Buruma
Outlook

When the West is under attack, as it was on September 11, it is often assumed — not only in America — that the West means the United States. This goes for those on the left, who believe that U.S. foreign policy (or « imperialism ») and U.S. corporate power (or « globalization ») have brought the suicide bombers and holy warriors upon America by marginalizing and bullying the millions of people who have failed to benefit from the capitalist world order. But it also goes for conservatives, who think that Islamist radicalism, like Communism before, is an attack on « our values, » that is, on the « American way of life. »

There is some truth to those claims. The worldwide reach of Wall Street, Hollywood, and the U.S. armed forces invites resentment. And to the extent that those institutions represent the American way of life, they are indeed targets of the Islamist jihad. It is also true that U.S. foreign policy can be misguided, even brutal. And global capitalism can do a great deal of damage as well as good. Finally, the United States, as the only Western superpower, has indeed come to stand for the West as a whole. And countries, such as Israel, that are looked upon as U.S. proxies provoke violent hostility for that reason alone.

However, the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothèque in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.

Something else is going on, which my co-author, Avishai Margalit, and I call Occidentalism (the title of our new book): a war against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor unique to Islamist extremism. The current jihadis see the West as something less than human, to be destroyed, as though it were a cancer. This idea has historical roots that long precede any form of « U.S. imperialism. » Similar hostility, though not always as lethal, has been directed in the past against Britain and France as much as against America. What, then, is the Occidentalist idea of the West?

That is the problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals who gathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan’s mission to smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia. The topic of discussion was « how to overcome the modern. » Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism.

Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The « modern thing, » said another, was a « European thing. » Others believed that « Americanism » was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World (there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be « overcome. »

All agreed that culture — that is, traditional Japanese culture — was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and Western intellect.

Precisely the same terms had been used by others, in other places, at other times. Blood, soil, and the spirit of the Volk were what German romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries invoked against the universalist claims of the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s invading armies. This notion of national soul was taken over by the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, who used it to attack the « Westernizers, » that is, Russian advocates of liberal reforms. It came up again and again, in the 1930s, when European fascists and National Socialists sought to smash « Americanism, » Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and « rootless cosmopolitanism » (meaning Jews).

Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian scholar, wrote a book in the 1930s about fascist ideology in Austria and Germany. He called it War Against the West. Communism, too, especially under Stalin, although a bastard child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was the sworn enemy of Western liberalism and « rootless cosmopolitanism. » Many Islamic radicals borrowed their anti-Western concepts from Russia and Germany. The founders of the Ba’ath Party in Syria were keen readers of prewar German race theories. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase « Westoxification » to describe the poisonous influence of Western civilization on other cultures. He, too, was an admirer of German ideas on blood and soil.

Clearly, the idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure, but also of the reaction against industrialization. Some Marxists have been attracted to it, but so, of course, have their enemies on the far right. Occidentalism is a revolt against rationalism (the cold, mechanical West, the machine civilization) and secularism, but also against individualism. European colonialism provoked Occidentalism, and so does global capitalism today. But one can speak of Occidentalism only when the revolt against the West becomes a form of pure destruction, when the West is depicted as less than human, when rebellion means murder.

Wherever it occurs, Occidentalism is fed by a sense of humiliation, of defeat. Isaiah Berlin once described the German revolt against Napoleon as « the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character. »

The same thing might be said about Japan in the 1930s, after almost a century of feeling snubbed and patronized by the West, whose achievements it so fervently tried to emulate. It has been true of the Russians, who have often slipped into the role of inferior upstarts, stuck in the outer reaches of Asia and Europe. But nothing matches the sense of failure and humiliation that afflicts the Arab world, a once glorious civilization left behind in every respect by the post-Enlightenment West.

Humiliation can easily turn into a cult of the pure and the authentic. Among the most resented attributes of the hated Occident are its claims to universalism. Christianity is a universalist faith, but so is the Enlightenment belief in reason. Napoleon was a universalist who believed in a common civil code for all his conquered subjects. The conviction that the United States represents universal values and has the God-given duty to spread democracy in the benighted world belongs to the same universalist tradition. Some of these values may indeed be universal. One would like to think that all people could benefit from democracy or the use of reason. The Code Napoleon brought many benefits. But when universal solutions are imposed by force, or when people feel threatened or humiliated or unable to compete with the powers that promote such solutions, that is when we see the dangerous retreat into dreams of purity.

Not all dreams of local authenticity and cultural uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong. As Isaiah Berlin also pointed out, the crooked timber of humanity cannot be forcibly straightened along universal standards with impunity. The experiments on the human soul by Communism showed how bloody universalist dreams can be. And the poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the Enlightenment.

It is when purity or authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins. The fact that anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and a general hostility to the West often overlap is surely no coincidence. Even in Japan, where Jews play no part in national life, one of the participants at the 1942 Kyoto conference suggested that the war against the West was a war against the « poisonous materialist civilization » built on Jewish financial capitalist power. At the same time, European anti-Semites, not only in Nazi Germany, were blaming the Jews for Bolshevism.

Both Bolshevism and capitalism are universalist systems in the sense that they do not recognize national, racial, or cultural borders. Since Jews are traditionally regarded by the defenders of purity as the congenital outsiders, the archetypal « rootless cosmopolitans, » it is no wonder that they are also seen as the main carriers of the universalist virus. To be sure, Jews had sound reasons to be attracted to such notions as equality before the law, secular politics, and internationalism, whether of a socialist or capitalist stamp. Exclusivity, whether racial, religious, or nationalist, is never good for minorities. Only in the Middle East have Jews brought their own form of exclusivity and nationalism. But Zionism came from the West. And so Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, is the colonial outpost of « Westoxification. » Its material success only added to the Arab sense of historic humiliation.

The idea, however, that Jews are a people without a soul, mimics with no creative powers, is much older than the founding of the State of Israel. It was one of the most common anti-Semitic slurs employed by Richard Wagner. He was neither the first to do so, nor very original in this respect. Karl Marx, himself the grandson of a rabbi, called the Jews greedy parasites, whose souls were made of money. The same kind of thing was often said by 19th-century Europeans about the British. The great Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane, who rather admired England, nonetheless opined that « the cult of the Gold Calf is the disease of the English people. » He was convinced that English society would be destroyed by « this yellow fever of gold, this sellout of all souls to the devil of Mammon. » And much the same is said today about the Americans.

Calculation — the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on — is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze pilots.

The hero is one who acts without calculating his interests. He jumps into action without regard for his own safety, ever ready to sacrifice himself for the cause. And the Occidentalist hero, whether he is a Nazi or an Islamist, is just as ready to destroy those who sully the purity of his race or creed. It is indeed his duty to do so. When the West is seen as the threat to authenticity, then it is the duty of all holy warriors to destroy anything to do with the « Zionist Crusaders, » whether it is a U.S. battleship, a British embassy, a Jewish cemetery, a chunk of lower Manhattan, or a disco in Bali. The symbolic value of these attacks is at least as important as the damage inflicted.

What, then, is new about the Islamist holy war against the West? Perhaps it is the totality of its vision. Islamism, as an antidote to Westoxification, is an odd mixture of the universal and the pure: universal because all people can, and in the eyes of the believers should, become orthodox Muslims; pure because those who refuse the call are not simply lost souls but savages who must be removed from this earth.

Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews, among others, but did not view the entire West with hostility. In fact, he wanted to forge an alliance with the British and other « Aryan » nations, and felt betrayed when they did not see things his way. Stalinists and Maoists murdered class enemies and were opposed to capitalism. But they never saw the Western world as less than human and thus to be physically eradicated. Japanese militarists went to war against Western empires but did not regard everything about Western civilization as barbarous. The Islamist contribution to the long history of Occidentalism is a religious vision of purity in which the idolatrous West simply has to be destroyed.

The worship of false gods is the worst religious sin in Islam as well as in ancient Judaism. The West, as conceived by Islamists, worships the false gods of money, sex, and other animal lusts. In this barbarous world the thoughts and laws and desires of Man have replaced the kingdom of God. The word for this state of affairs is jahiliyya, which can mean idolatry, religious ignorance, or barbarism. Applied to the pre-Islamic Arabs, it means ignorance: People worshiped other gods because they did not know better. But the new jahiliyya, in the sense of barbarism, is everywhere, from Las Vegas and Wall Street to the palaces of Riyadh. To an Islamist, anything that is not pure, that does not belong to the kingdom of God, is by definition barbarous and must be destroyed.

Just as the main enemies of Russian Slavophiles were Russian Westernizers, the most immediate targets of Islamists are the liberals, reformists, and secular rulers in their own societies. They are the savage stains that have to be cleansed with blood. But the source of the barbarism that has seduced Saudi princes and Algerian intellectuals as much as the whores and pimps of New York (and in a sense all infidels are whores and pimps) is the West. And that is why holy war has been declared against the West.

Since the target of the holy warriors is so large, figuring out how to defend it is not easy. But it is not immediately apparent that a war against Iraq was the most effective way to fight the Islamist jihad. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime was a murderous dictatorship that deserved to come to an end, but it was not in line with the holy revolution. There is no evidence that Saddam wished to destroy the West. Osama bin Laden clearly does, and he is still at large. It may even be that attacking Iraq, however gratifying in many ways, has made the defense against Islamist revolution harder. Moderate Muslims everywhere are cowed into silence by aggressive U.S. actions, for fear of being seen as traitors or, worse, barbarous idolators.

As even President Bush has been at pains to point out, the battle with religious terrorism is not a war against Islam, or even religion. Violent attempts to force secularism on Muslim societies in the past invited the problem of religious extremism and should not be seen as the solution now. Zealotry was in part a reaction against the aggressive secularism of such regimes as Reza Shah’s in Iran during the 1930s. If political freedoms are to be guaranteed in the Muslim world through popular sovereignty, religion will have to be taken into account. The best chance for democracies to succeed in countries as varied as Indonesia, Turkey, and Iraq is if moderate Muslims can be successfully mobilized. But that will have to come from those countries themselves. Even though Western governments should back the forces for democracy, the hard political struggle cannot be won in Washington, or through the force of U.S. arms.

In the West itself, we must defend our freedoms against the holy warriors who seek to destroy them. But we must also be careful that in doing so we don’t end up undermining them ourselves. In the balance between security and civil liberty, the latter should never be sacrificed to the former. We should also guard against the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. To think that we are at war with Islamism in the name of Christianity, as some zealots believe, is a fatal error, for that is to conform precisely to the Manichaeistic view of those who seek to defeat us. Muslims living in the West should not be allowed to join the holy war against it. But their rights as Europeans or Americans must be respected. The survival of our liberties depends on our willingness to defend them against enemies outside, but also against the temptation of our own leaders to use our fears in order to destroy our freedoms.

Ian Buruma is a professor of human rights, democracy, and new-media studies at Bard College and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He and Avishai Margalit, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, are the authors of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, which will be published by the Penguin Press next month.

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“We believe one of the suicide bombers studied in the UK and later on did his postgraduate (degree) in Australia before coming back to Sri Lanka.”

Ruwan Wijewardene (Sri Lankan junior defence minister)

“What we can say is some of the suspected bombers, most of them are well-educated and come from maybe middle or upper middle class so are financially independent and their families are quite stable. That’s a worrying factor in this because some of them have studied in various other countries.”

Muslim Council of Sri Lanka president NM Ameen told The Australian earlier today that he understood that at least one of the sons of a wealthy and prominent spice trader now being questioned over his children’s involvement in the bombings had studied in Australia. Two of the exporter’s sons are understood to have detonated suicide bomb vests at the Cinnamon Grand and Shangri-la hotels. A second bomber involved in the Shangri-La blast is believed to be the extremist Islamic scholar, Zahran Hashmi, who was the spokesman and organiser of the previously little-known National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ) group believed to be behind the worst
terror attacks on Sri Lankan soil in more than a decade.

One of the spice trader’s son’s wives reportedly blew herself up at the family residence …